"He's Finished" — The US Captain Who Mocked the SAS Veteran Minutes Before He Turned the Battle
Chapter 9
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This habit had been noticed by Halloran in the observation post, reported by radio to Merrick, and had become, at 11:08, the reason a decision had been made to shorten the timeline by removing the sentry before the assault rather than during it.Doyle had been given the task. Doyle had chewed the corner of his lower lip, had read the movement of the dust on the ground at his own height, and had done the arithmetic: 430 meters, crosswind from the west at approximately four knots, air temperature climbing. The load: subsonic, chosen for report suppression rather than for flatness of trajectory, which meant a significant drop over that distance and a specific hold.Doyle had held. He had breathed out. He had squeezed the trigger of the L115A3 at the natural pause at the bottom of his exhalation.The round, from where the captain was standing on the roof of the operations building, could not be heard. This was partly because of the range and partly because of the load. What Kohler heard, 430 meters of desert away, was a soft, flat sound like the closing of a fridge door, and then nothing.Through the Swarovski, he saw the sentry on the wall stop walking. The sentry stood for perhaps a second and a half. Then his knees, which had been holding him up for the previous 38 years of his life, stopped holding him up, and he went down against the parapet in the loose, unarranged way of a man whose central nervous system had received a message it could not process.The three other armed men on the compound wall, 12 to 18 meters away in various directions, did not react. They did not react because they had not, at any point in the sequence, heard anything that they would have identified as a rifle shot. The one man of the three who was facing the sentry's direction was, at the moment of the shot, lighting a cigarette and looking down at his hands. When he looked up 90 seconds later and saw the sentry down, he assumed, quite reasonably, that the sentry had had some kind of medical event, and he began to walk unhurriedly along the wall towards him.He would not reach him.Halloran from the observation post had put a call over the net at the moment of the shot, and a second sniper pair to the northwest had been given the second sentry, and the second sentry had, by the time the first was being walked towards, also stopped standing. And so, 30 seconds later, had the third.Doyle's rifle had spoken three times in six and a half minutes. It had been heard by no one on the compound wall.The captain had been looking through the Swarovski for the whole sequence. He had watched three armed men die on a wall 430 meters away, in silence, without any of the men within 12 meters of them noticing that they had died. He had watched it happen at a range at which he had personally, in his best day at Fort Benning, put a 5.56 round approximately 11 inches off-center on a stationary paper target. He had watched it happen with a load chosen specifically to make sure that the sound of the rifle was quieter than the sound of the man falling.